Source: Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction budgets, adjusted for inflation based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data

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On an otherwise quiet Easter Sunday, inmates at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility staged a coup of the sparsely staffed prison and the facility descended into a riotous hell that lasted 11 days and claimed the lives of a new guard and nine inmates executed by their fellow prisoners.

In the 20 years since April 11, 1993, Ohio’s prisons have spent millions of dollars, installed thousands of cameras and written hundreds of policies to ensure the Lucasville riots are never repeated.

However, as gang membership and inmate-to-staff ratios rise, members of the Ohio Civil Services Employees Association said Ohio’s prisons aren’t as safe as they should be.

“A lot of the red flags that were flashed in the early ’90s are flashing again,” said Paul Goldberg, former union director and author of the union’s study recommending changes after the riot.

Overcrowded, understaffed

In April 1993, Ohio’s prisons were operating at more than 187 percent of capacity, and the staff-to-inmate ratio was 8.8-to-1 — the worst in the nation. The Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville was housing more than 1,800 prisoners at the time of the riot, 804 of whom were living two to a cell.

“When you have numbers like that (more than 2,000 inmates in high-security facilities), wardens can focus on groups, but it’s very difficult to look at (them all),” current Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Director Gary Mohr said.

The Southern Ohio Correctional Facility accepted numerous dangerous offenders from the Mansfield Correctional Institution, which was not considered secure enough. Mansfield corrections officer Thomas Davis Jr. died of injuries from being assaulted on the job in June 1992.

The conditions were harsher at Lucasville than in Mansfield. Inmates were farther from home, had no access to phones and were surrounded by more violent offenders. Muslim inmates were upset about receiving tuberculosis immunizations that they said went against the Koran.

“Conditions of confinement were far less desirable than what a lot of inmates had been used to most recently in Mansfield. It was like a different world,” Mohr said.

The prison was understaffed April 11, 1993, because of the Easter holiday, and guards easily were overpowered by the hundreds of inmates moving from recreation period in the yard to L-block, where prisoners seized control and remained for 11 days.

“Lucasville was merely a highly visible symptom of what’s wrong in Ohio’s prisons,” Goldberg wrote in his report after the riot. “Overcrowding and understaffing is actually far worse in the other 21 adult prisons in Ohio (and remains a serious problem in Ohio’s juvenile corrections system as well).”

After the riot, the Ohio General Assembly pumped $231.3 million into the prison system during the next two-year budget, giving money for 904 additional corrections officers and building another high-security prison in Youngstown, which became the Ohio State Penitentiary.

The infusion of dollars helped the prison system’s inmate-to-staff ratio drop to 6.8-to-1 by 1995 and hit a low of 5.3-to-1 in 2001. Since then, the inmate-to-staff ratio has risen to 7.2-to-1 in 2013 — far from the 4-to-1 ratio the union demanded following the riot.

Mohr said that ratio is manageable because corrections officers are assisted by case managers and unit managers. Mohr re-implemented unit management in January 2011 after a visit to Mansfield Correctional Institution, where correction officers were shaking down cells, running counts, providing counseling and performing room checks at the same time.

“Now, I will tell you that 7.2-to-1 without unit management, to me, was unacceptable because we had abandoned the officers,” Mohr said. “I think bringing unit management back in makes that number a manageable number and something that we can work with.”

However, OCSEA president Christopher Mabe said unit management is not an effective substitute for proper staffing, and Gov. John Kasich’s proposal to privatize food services in prisons will only destabilize an already unstable population. The job cuts have placed Ohio’s prisons at almost pre-riot levels, he said.

“The state has not only lost every officer gained after Lucasville, we’ve lost nearly double that many, without a corresponding reduction in the inmate population,” Mabe said.

While funding of Ohio’s prison system, adjusted for inflation, has increased 44 percent in the past 20 years, it has decreased 18 percent in the past decade. The current budget of $1.57 billion is the lowest since 1996, adjusted for inflation. The dollars spent per inmate, an average of $68.80 per day in fiscal year 2012, was the lowest since fiscal year 1997.

The funding level is a problem for union members who know dollars mean better staffing, but Mohr said the prison system is adapting to the funding available.

“I think if we did things always the way we have been doing things, they we’d need more money. I think we need to continue to get better,” he said, including using a Back to Basics program that seeks input from corrections officers.

Violent groups

In 1993, overcrowding forced inmates into cells with dangerous people of different ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds, frequently leading to disputes and violence. A 1990 Ohio Supreme Court decision, rolled out slowly across the prison system, required prisoners to integrate.

Security threat groups, also known as gangs, sparked assaults and comprised about 13 percent of the prison population at the time.

Less dangerous inmates had little hope of escaping Lucasville. About 75 percent of inmates who met behavioral benchmarks to be moved to a lower security prison with access to vocational training were denied transfers by Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction headquarters, often without reason or regard for the warden’s recommendation.

Since the riot, prison officials have eliminated putting two inmates in a cell at the state’s highest security prisons — Southern Ohio Correctional Facility and Ohio State Penitentiary. The practice remains in Ohio’s other prisons.

They also addressed transfers with a three-tier system, which rewards good behavior with privileges and punishes poor behavior with restrictions, Mohr said. Since October, only three Lucasville prisoners seeking a transfer to a lower-security prison were denied.

Not all changes have been positive. Gang membership has risen to one in six inmates and remains highest at the state’s maximum security prisons — 55.6 percent at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown and 46.6 percent at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, according to a recent Correctional Institution Inspection Committee report.

“That’s been one change that continues to grow all across our country is the number of security threat groups,” Mohr said.

The high numbers in Lucasville and Youngstown are not surprising given policies implemented in 2012 to transfer active and disruptive gang members to more secure facilities. Violence has risen at the more secure locations, but inmates are more likely to spit on a corrections officer than assault one, which was happening at the less-secure locations, Mohr said.

After the 1993 riot, Ohio’s prisons hired a person to oversee anti-gang operations and other staff to assist corrections officers in identifying and reporting gang affiliation and behaviors.

“The biggest difference is we attempt to be proactive rather than reactive inside an institution today,” said Donald Morgan, the current warden at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. “Prior to what we did in ’93, ... it was kind of a hands off, stay away from the gangs where now, we’re engaged.”

Preparing for the worst

Union officials were more impressed by the prison system’s improvements in responding to crises following Lucasville. Ohio was a model for crisis management in the 1990s, but staffing cuts since then have minimized the system’s effectiveness, Mabe said.

After the riots, prison officials created an incident management system modeled off the Division of Forestry that implemented clear procedures on chain of command during crises, Mohr said. Officers and management are tested on the procedures twice annually when an inspector randomly visits and presents a crisis scenario.

During the riot, hostages couldn’t get through on phone lines to the command center and officers rushed into L-block to help without leaving reserves behind in case of a bigger problem.

“All that we learned from the riot, and that’s the type of drills we do today,” said Ross Correctional Institution Warden Mick Oppy, who started his career in 1991 at Lucasville.“The (incident management system) is by far the greatest thing we’ve done in this department.”

Prisoners also no longer work as clerks with access to records and inter-office communication, Mabe said.

Designing a better prison

Another part of response is having a facility that is secure enough to withstand a crisis. The way Lucasville was set up contributed to how quickly the riot spread, Oppy said.

“When I went to Lucasville out of the academy, I was kind of in disbelief that this is how a prison was on the movement, but I didn’t know anything different,” Oppy said. “It was really nothing to have probably 600 inmates in the gymnasium at one time with very few staff.”

After the riot, $20 million was spent on repairing and upgrading Lucasville’s L-block. The renovations, which included an enclosed control center, gates, a reinforced steel wall and cameras, controlled movement in ways the old set-up never did, Oppy said. No more than 20 inmates move at a time compared to 160 before the riot.

Ohio State Penitentiary, which was modeled after state and federal supermax prisons, was constructed for $65 million to handle overcrowding among Ohio’s most violent offenders, Mohr said.

Union officials gave prison structures the highest score on their review of recommendations issued after the riot. Prisons are built like campuses rather than fortresses now to minimize the likelihood that prisoners will gather en masse, Mabe said.

Since January 2011, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction has installed 4,000 cameras and plans to install 1,000 more, Mohr said.

“We want inmates to know we’ve got them, because if they are going to do something, we’re going to catch them,” he said.